The Bolivar bulletin. [volume] (Bolivar, Hardeman County, Tenn.) 1865-1888, 1887-03-11

take rest; let your mind lie talloW;
don't work so much" and seem to
think that brain work especially is a
| constant drain upon ones vital capital.
Others, believe more truly, look upon
idleness as the real "thief Of time, " and
point to the great workers who have
lived to grand old age. Mathema-
ticians claim that even the absorbing
mental process of working out diff
cult problems is conducive to lon
gevity Leibnitz, they tell us, lived
his seventy years; Euler his seventy
six; Lagrange his seventy-seven; La
place his seventy-eight years; while
Sir Isaac Newton died at eighty-five,
Plato at eighty-two, Archimedes at
seventy-hve, and the somewhat myth
cal PythagOras at ninety. Some of
these ancients, however, were not en-
| inent mathematicians, but may be
classed as general philosophers, natu-
raj or metaphysical. Poets do not al
ways die before their time, as Keats
and Byron and Arthur Hugh Clough
did. On the contrary, the much
abused Tennyson, will survive, proph-
esy, all the terrible criticisms on his
| conservatism, which have been made
about his last poem, and perhaps most
severely by the ex-Prime Minister Glad
| stone, who conferred the Earldom upon
him. But taking the poets of all times
| and countries 1 find that Pindar lived
to so, Sophocles to 80, Euripidcs to Is,
| Simonides to 80, Michael Angelo, who
was not only poet, but painter, sculptor
and architect, to 80, Godfrey Chaucer,
''the father of English poetry, to II,
William Wordsworth to so and Walter
Savage Lander to 80. How a man of
Landor's furious temper could live so
long is a miracle.
No life, one would think, could be
more exhaustive than that of a Judge
who has to sit for hours together, day
| after day, in a crowded court room;
yet many of the Lord Chancellors and
Chief Justices of England, as well as
Chief Justices of our own country, have
lived far beyond the three score years
and ten.
Sleep is as great medicine and sup
port of the nervous system-and life,
being interpreted, means the nervous
system, neither more nor less-as food,
probably much more so if we may
| judge by some animals that subsist for
all the winter months on sleep
alone. Yet many strong persons who
| do not know what it is to lie awake all
/ night die prematurely, while l have
myself met in Brooklyn some persons
who could not get an hours rest in a
week who have gone on living with
wonderful tenacity.
| Dear old Mrs. Delaney used some
times to eat nothing for days, lie awake
all nights for weeks together, cry her
old eyes out with the half memories of
the days gone by, and yet she exceeded
century of life by nearly a year. 1t
is remarkable fact that in every Eu-
ropean country statisticians of unques-
tionable character for veracity have
sometimes denied point blank that any
man or woman has attained or exceed
ed the age of 100 years. The greatest
of these longevity skeptics was Sir
! George Cornwall Lewis, who died
some twenty years ago. He was, if l
remember, Chancellor of the Exchequer
for two or three terms under Lord Pal
merstOn. At Christ Church, Oxford, he
was a Double First and was regarded at
the Union Debating Society as the most
reliable authority for facts. A Chan
cellor of the Exchequer is the last man
in the world, one would suppose, to
travel outside the narrow boundaries
of statistics, and his exactness of mind
rs n statesman, made his skepticism
about old age the more remarkable.
Had he lived in the time of Cicero he
would probably have told that eulogist
of longevity that there had never been
any thing of the kind on this planet
and that no human being had ever
crept out of his cradle or exceeded the
nursery experience ''when love and
laughter both were young" There
| are some persons like the great "dOubt-
| ing Judge" Lord Peterborough, who
repel the best proved facts with an a
priori theory of probabilities. Those
who don't feel like living out their
| century are apt to think that no one
| else has a mind to do so. Yet I can
| personally swear to having known q
man aged 112, and although the fact
seemed nominated in the bond of
! his ancient mariners face and "espec-
] ldltN luG tltlCulAltAlAN VI Ills NIIIhlCu
| brow, the parish church books, which
| searched with the disinterested help of
| both rector and sexton, proved the date
| of birth, of baptism, of confirmation and
of so many hymeneal devotiOns
at the old communion table as
would have made the Prophet
Smith or Brigham Young turn
! green with envy. But some investiga-
| tors are as credulOus as Mr.. Pickwick
when he paid five pounds for the anti
| quarian stone in the good old Town of
Rochester and discovered late that the
! cross upon it was not quite so ancient
as the cross of Constantine. Like
! Henry Thomas Buckle, Sir George
| COrnewan Lewis first became enthused
with a theory and then set to work to
make history and statistics accord with
it, Yet even he could scarcely deny
that Martin Joseph Routh, president of
Magdalen College, Oxford, lived his
century; nor that Lord Saint Leonards,
one of the keenest of English lawyers,
| lived to 90. / have only known one or
two centenarians, but 1 could put down
a dozen men and women whom l have
been personally well acquainted with
who have nearly approached their cen
| tennial
Prof Humphrey, of Cambridge, Eng
land, University, who bias made lon
| gevity a scientific study, does not
theorise at all, but gives the numbers
as he finds them in some very interest
! ing tables. He records the recent
deaths of eleven persons, two men and
nine women, who, out of fifty-two cases